Characteristics of the Slovenian language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Slovenian, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.
Slovenian has three genders for nouns: masculine (animate and inanimate), feminine and neuter. There are three numbers: singular, dual, and plural. Additionally, Slovenian has six cases for nouns.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | masculine inanimate | star avto (an old car) |
| masculine animate | star zdravnik (an old doctor) | |
| feminine | stara ženska (an old woman) | |
| neuter | staro mesto (an old town) | |
| number | singular | oko (eye) |
| plural | očesa (eyes) | |
| dual | očesi (eyes) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | pes (dog) |
| genitive | Vidim psa (I see a dog) | |
| dative | Žogo dam psu. (I give the ball to the dog.) | |
| accusative | Učim psa. (I teach the dog.) | |
| instrumental | Slepec se sprehaja s psom. (The blind man walks with a dog.) | |
| locative | Ptica pristane na psu. (The bird lands on the dog.) | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | rdeče jabolko (red apple) |
| verb tenses | present | on/ona kupuje (he/she buys) |
| past | on/ona je kupoval/a (he bought) | |
| future | on/ona bo kupil/a (he will buy) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Slovenian is the following:
preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun
See for example:
o teh treh priljubljenih knjigah
about these three popular books[pl,loc]
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
Slovenian nouns are inflected for number and case. Nouns should be added to the lexicon with their grammatical gender if they do not inflect regularly. If the lexicon entry is missing, the NLG platform tries to find the most probable gender based on heuristics.
Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for noga (leg) contains:
- gender: feminine
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | Dual | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | noga | nogi | noge |
| Accusative | nogo | nogi | noge |
| Genitive | noge | nog | nog |
| Dative | nogi | nogama | nogam |
| Locative | nogi | nogah | nogah |
| Instrumental | nogo | nogama | nogami |
Note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Slovenian with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table encodes gender, case, and number. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".
Verbs
Slovenian verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and in some cases gender. The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects incorrectly, you should add it to the lexicon.
Note that the future tense is formed by taking the future tense conjugation of the verb bíti (to be) and the past tense form of the main verb (i.e. 2 verb containers):
Bom bral.
(I will be reading. [biti + brati])
The past tense is formed by the present tense form of the auxiliary verb biti and the past form of the main verb. Since both components of this compound verb can be split up in a sentence, it's best practice to configure two verb containers to be able to place them independently.
Otrok je očetu pokazal sliko.
(The child showed [male,sg] the picture to the father.)
Otroci so pokazali sliko.
(The children showed [male,pl] the picture.)
Container settings
Determiner
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Slovenian: demonstrative, possessive, and quantifier (every).
Numerals
The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.
| cardinal | ordinal | |
|---|---|---|
| text | devet dni (nine days) | deveti dan (the ninth day) |
| digit | 9 dni (9 days) | 9. dan (the 9th day) |
For Slovenian, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 20 on the platform, otherwise (above 20) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:
dvajset avtomobilov
(twenty cars)
vs.
21 avtomobilov
(21 cars)
In Slovenian, case and number for noun/adjective change based on numerals (if no other case than nominative or accusative is set), for example:
| Numeral | case / number | example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nominative/Singular | 1 rdeča hiša (1 red house) |
| 2-4 | Nominative/Plural | 3 rdeče hiše (3 red houses) |
| >= 5 | Genitive/Plural | 7 rdečih hiš (7 red houses) |
Number
Slovenian's basic numbers are singular and plural, but it still has some remnants of the dual number. The dual only remained for nouns representing paired body parts like eye(s), leg(s), ear(s) etc. For example, when using noga (leg) to refer to the part of the body, the dual form is taken, but when used to refer to a leg on a chair or table, the regular plural is taken:
Stopala je s svojima nogama
(she was walking with her feet [anatomical])
Opazila je stol z mnogimi nogami
(she noticed a chair with many legs [table/chair])
Additionally, a few of these nouns switch gender when the number changes - neuter in the singular and feminine in the dual. It is a very rare case, so please contact support, if you encounter such a case and need to define different genders per number to inflect associated adjectives and verbs correctly. For example:
| Number | Gender | example |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | Neuter | modro oko (a blue eye) |
| Plural | Neuter | mastna očesa (greasy eyes/grease drops) |
| Dual | Feminine | modra/e očesi/oči (blue eyes [anatomical]) |
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container Nemčija (Germany) are: preposition="v" and case="loc".
v Nemčiji
(in Germany)
For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Islandija (Iceland)), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="v", case="loc"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from v to na:
na Islandiji
(in Iceland)